


In Bloom

by lorax



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Backstory, Cataclysm, Gen, Missing Scene, Worgen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-08
Updated: 2011-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-14 07:15:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/512706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorax/pseuds/lorax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lorna Crowley comes to terms with her life, after the fall of Gilneas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Bloom

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the short story contest Blizzard ran some time ago. Obviously, it didn't win! I wanted to try to fill in some of the post-Cata story for Lorna and give her a new path, since at the time Blizz hadn't done anything with her, and she was my favorite character of the expansion. (They may have rectified that now, I've been out of the game quite a while.) Posted here for the sake of archiving.

"The earth is ripped asunder, the Forsaken spread their rot throughout Azeroth, and you quibble over methods?  Father, I-"  
  
"Enough!"  Darius slammed a hand against the table, fingers curling into claws against the rough wood.  He flinched at his own show of anger, voice softening again,  "I saved you-"  
  
"You saved me to keep me weak?" Lorna demanded, chin lifting, staring into her father's eyes until he looked away.  "I am no pawn of the Forsaken, and no wilting flower you need protect.  These are MY people, too.  My fight as much as it is yours.  You laid down arms to rescue me, do you not think that I feel guilt for that?  What right had you to put me above others?  And now you do it again, without my consent!"  
  
Darius pushed away from the table, thin veneer of humanity giving way to the creak and crack of twisting bones.  The familiar, tired face of her father shifted into its new lupine form, the single fierce eye gleaming, its missing twin somehow more obvious in this new shape.  "Look then, and see what you ask," he said, eye aglow, staring Lorna down.  "I will not see my daughter a monster, as I am.  Yes, I chose you above the Front.  I would do so again.  Do not ask this of me."  
  
Lorna reached up, hands cupping the fierce face, fingers winding into the wiry fur.  It mattered nothing to her what form his face took, or what blood burned in his veins.  He was her father, and she knew him and loved him.  "You are no monster.  You are not subject to the whim of a beast, is that not what you have said?  There is more strength of humanity in you, and in our people than sits in the hearts of most of our allies.  You defied a King to do what was right, once, and our people followed you.  Now they follow you again when you show that what they are need not be a curse that takes their souls from them.  They believe this because you believe.  Why is it true for them, but not for me?  If it were me who wore the shape of a worgen, would you call me monster, too?"  
  
"They have no choice, as I have none.  You can live a life free of this taint.  That is all I want for you, and damn your stubborn heart for trying to change my mind," Darius told her, jerking away from her touch.  
  
"And damn you for never listening to what I say instead of what you hope to hear!  Your stubborn refusal to give me what I ask for rob me of a choice that should be mine to me.  None will stand against you and grant me the bite against your will.  You cannot decide my fate forever because the path I choose is not what you would have wished for me.  I love you, father.  But I will not steer my life on a course you set."  Lorna stepped to the side, not letting her father turn away from her, ignoring his terse grunt of dismissal.  "If you will not let me be what you are, then so be it.  But I will not sit idly by, father.  I am strong, with or without the bite, I will grow stronger, and in time I will take my own vengeance on the Forsaken.  Sylvannas will pay for what she has wrought."  Lorna looked away at last, voice dropping and hands fisting at her sides, the memory of her time as a captive lying too-fresh in her memory to be easily set aside.  "I will not be made helpless again."  
  
Darius growled, and it was Lorna who pulled away from the clawed hand he tried to place on her shoulder, this time.  "Enough, I am weary of this argument, and will speak of it no more.  You are my daughter, and you are a woman grown who owes no obedience to her father.  But I am Lord Crowley, and that at least you will respect, just as I expect from those who follow me."  
  
"I have said my piece," Lorna agreed, making a sound of disgust and turning away with a stiff, brief bow.  "Respect you will have, always and without asking.  I only wish you'd grant me the same."  She felt eyes watching her, but they knew better than to step between her and her path as she left.  The argument had not gone unheard, and it was far from the first of its kind.  As she left, Lorna tore the flower from behind her ear and let it fall.  It was a wilted bloom, the last she had of Gilneas, and she would not replace it with a Darnassian flower.  
  
***  
  
Lorna had dwelt in this city long enough that her feet knew the pathways of Darnassus.  It was not her home, and never would be, but she knew its angles and shapes and could walk beneath the branches of its trees and feel some sense of peace, if not the kind of serenity that came with belonging.  She could walk, and let her mind wander as it would.  
  
She watched the city's residents, sometimes.  They had aided her, and been a great comfort in her people's time of need, but there was something so strange in the elves, to Lorna.  She could look from one to the other and see no difference between one who had seen a century, and one who had seen five.  They all wore time around them like a cloak, and sometimes she felt as if the oldest of them looked at her as she would look at a butterfly, bright and brief and gone too quickly to hold any substance in the world.  All of her struggles and uncertainty, the deaths of those she loved, the births and losses and victories and triumphs of her life could be lived out in a span of time that seemed as nothing to the elves.  Lorna sometimes thought she envied them the tranquility of caring for the world at large and not the brief flashes of life that moved through it.  The rest of the time she resented it.   
  
Eventually, the elves would remember the wars and the struggle and the fire of the Worldbreaker and forget who it was that was broken in his escape.  Lorna would be just a name in thousands to the elves whose city she lived in, someday.  There was a time that might have been a comfort to her.  She'd had no need of glory, she wanted only a life of her own and the freedom to live it.  Now the notion chafed beneath her skin.  If she was remembered, it would be as a daughter, as a captive, as a pawn in a game begun long before her, and continuing long after.  
  
She would allow that to be all she was.  A thousand times Lorna had relived those days and moments in her mind and damned herself for being caught.  She'd damned her father for putting her above his people, and not giving her a choice to make a sacrifice he would gladly have made of himself.  And she'd damned too the small part of her that was glad for life to still beat in her chest, and to have been spared the living death of the Forsaken.    
  
Lorna's steps took her to the familiar archery targets, and she watched as an elf shot arrow after arrow into the packed straw target's base.  He turned, smile soft and dreamy as he pulled his arrows and left, voice murmuring a goodbye in the language Lorna knew only the barest patches of.  She hefted the blunderbuss across her back.  She felt crass and coarse by comparison, but pushed the feeling aside, unwilling to give it credence.  Lorna packed the powder with the ease of long familiarity and took a shot.  One led to two to a dozen and the squint of aiming, the pulse of release and the sharp sound of gunfire became soothing, bit by bit.  
  
"It lacks the grace of a bow, does it not?" Lorna wasn't sure how long it had been when the voice broke in, low and soft with a hint of an accent she couldn't place lurking in the long vowel sounds.  She was disconcerted by how silently the elf had stolen up beside her, but tried not to show it.  Something must have filtered through though, as the woman chuckled.  "You were lost in your efforts, and in a place of safety, else you would have seen me come upon you.  If not me, then my companion.  She is not so light of foot as she normally is."  The woman gestured behind her and Lorna took in the wolf who followed at her heels, its normally sleek shape turned rounded with pups on the way.  The sight sent a sharp pang of wistful longing through Lorna for the Mastiffs she'd raised.  She sometimes regretted giving them over to others of Gilneas to train as their own, though she counted it one of the few ways she was allowed to be of use since they fled Gilneas.    
  
The wolf bared her teeth, more friendly complaint than threat, and nudged the elf's hand into stroking her ears.  "I've never understood the dwarven love of guns," the elf continued.  "My sisters and I blamed Nesingwary and his mad devotees, running about, enamored with the sound of their guns and the power of wanton death.  I've since seen there are more than those fools who wield them, but I've never seen the beauty of them.  Death holds such power and ugliness, the beauty of a clean bow line and a true shot seems a counter to that, in my eyes."  
  
Lorna looked at her, the graceful line of her neck, the curve of the bow over her shoulder.  It was beautiful, and it left her unmoved.  "There is no beauty in death, but there is purpose.  It is the same with a gun.  It is. . . precision, and power.  There is worth in that."  
  
"But no music.  The pull of a bow is a melody, terrible or kind, depending on what its song is for.  What do you hear in the sound of a racing bullet?"  
  
Lorna thought of Sylvannas, a graceful bow at her back.  She'd once heard a song that sung of the beauty of the Windrunner sisters, and how Sylvannas had shone, even beyond death.  Lorna saw only the decay of her.  If she'd drawn her bow, it would have sounded like war, to Lorna, music-less and grim.  "I hear strength," she finally said.  She smiled, slight and wry.  "And a very loud boom."  
  
The elf laughed.  "Does it not shake your teeth in your jaw?"  
  
"You grow accustomed to it."  Lorna looked at her, and then held the gun out in offering, not sure why she felt moved to do so.  "I can show you."    
  
The elf's hands were rough with callouses, her arms strong from the pull of a bow.  She had no need of another weapon, but she took it, head tilting.  "A trade, then," she said, and unslung the bow, the curve of it half as tall as Lorna and gleaming with a life all its own.  
  
Lorna took it, feeling the unfamiliar weight, testing the string.  "A trade," she agreed, and she smiled as the heavy wolf beside them snuffled and then stretched out, bored with the lesson before it began.  
***  
  
The elf's name was Liala, and her wolf was Silvertail, and the city was not their home.  She came each day, and she spoke of the icy peaks of Northrend, and the strangeness of Azshara, after the rise of the Worldbreaker.  She and her sisters had traveled the world, and through her Lorna began to sense just how vast the Alliance her people had stepped into was, and what it meant.  She wished then that Greymane had listened to her father all those years before, when he strove to ally them with the Alliance.  How different would Gilneas look now, if only he had listened?  
  
On the second day Liala brought a bow, finely made and lighter than her own, weighted for Lorna.  In time she added a quiver, and a knife carved of dragonbone that felt light and alive in her hand.  Lorna's hands grew sore, and then stronger, blisters forming into calluses.  Liala remembered the places she had seen, and the people she had met.  It was a strange comfort to hear that, and know that not all who were human were forgettable to those who lived for an age.  What had seemed such sleepy disinterest in the elves at first, Liala showed instead as an endless and soft patience that Lorna grew to admire.    
  
When they spoke of her father, Liala called him a man of strength, and Lorna called him a man of stubborn arrogance and temper.  Liala's laughter made it easier to look at him, and not feel angry at what he would not let her become.  As the days turned to weeks, his refusal seemed less weighty, and less a solid block in her path.  Instead it became a step along it, and Lorna began to look to the day when she stepped past it entirely.  
  
When Silvertail whelped her pups, the wolf set the darkest of them in Lorna's lap like a gift, and the sleepy gold eyes stared up at her as if they knew her.  "She would leave him with you, when he is ready," Liala told her, and Lorna thought again of her mastiffs, but held the pup close and smelled the new-fur scent of him and felt more at peace than she had since the day she was taken by the Forsaken.  
  
Together they tested targets and sparred until they were too tired to lift their arms, and Lorna called Liala friend in her thoughts, though it had been so long since she had made a friend that it felt strange to speak, and she left it unsaid.  Liala grew adept with the gun, though she would always favor her bow, she said.  
  
She spent her nights with her father and her people, seeing to the needs of her people, but she was not the same as they were, any longer.  Lorna ached to help, but she was outside, and no amount of history could change that.  Only blood could fix that, and hers was clean of the taint, and they would not look to her as they once had.  Her days she spent with Liala, and the gulf between the Gilnean refugees and her widened with every setting sun.  At first it pained her, but in time it seemed a gift, releasing her from staying ever where they were and following at the feet of her father and his King.  
  
"You seek to find a place where once you had one, but there is no longer a space for you.  To try to reclaim it would be a step backward, and no one can turn back the march of time and have it remain forever unchanged," Liala told her, and Lorna knew it as truth.  
  
"I would leave this place, if it cannot be my home."  Beside them Silvertail's cubs tumbled, half grown already.  "You will leave soon, won't you?"  
  
Liala watched her, and then nodded.  "I would.  My sisters send word of need, and I have been too long in this city.  My feet miss the ground of other places, and my heart the company of my sisters."  She smiled, a question in her eyes.  "Though it will miss you, too, when I have gone.  We always miss what is not near to us when we are gone away."  
  
 Lorna thought of her father, and of the friends she had lost to the fall of Gilneas, to the treachery of the Horde, and to the Curse.  She would mourn them.  She would love those who remained.  But she would not stay and be a shadow.  "I could come with you."  She met Liana's pale blue eyes.  "I am no elf.  I will not think as you do, or see the span of time that you will.  But I can hunt, I can wield a bow and walk the world and shoot a gun, noise or no.  I can be of use."  
  
Liala was quiet for a long moment as the dark pup Lorna had not yet found a name for pushed his way into her lap and whined for petting.  Lorna stroked him automatically and Liala watched.  "There are many names for us, my sisters and our brothers and I.  The High court called them Rangers, but we take an older name.  Sentinels.  We are, all of us, elves, and hold a kinship through that.  We have gifts and callings.  I think, my friend, that you share some of them, but it would not be a simple path."  She swept back the long braid of her pale violet hair and watched the cubs play.  
  
Lorna ached to argue, but she waited, the patience Liala strove to teach her slow to come, but taking gradual root.  "There was one," Liala said.  "A human.  In time, they called him the Hand of the Banshee Queen.  He learned our ways, and he went with Sylvannas to the Forsaken, when his true life ended and begin again as undead.  There are those who believe that it was in his nature, and that men are not meant to train as we are, lest they all follow as the Blightcaller did."  
  
"You do not think so, else you would have not taught me as you did," Lorna said, and was rewarded with a sly smile.  
  
"You were lost," Liala said.  "I wished to show you the way, whichever path that way might lead down.  If this is your wish, then I will gladly take you with me.  But it will be difficult.  You will leave your people and your place among them behind.  You will be their ally, but your family will lie with us.  You will be my sister in truth, Lorna Crowley."  
  
Lorna thought of that.  "I will always be my father's daughter.  I will always be of Gilneas.  But there is more yet to me, and I will be this, too, and damn any who tell me otherwise."  The pup whined and Lorna looked down.  "And you.  You are named Dog."  
  
Liala looked pained and then laughed, and Lorna felt a smile tug up the corners of her mouth, and a welcome warmth in her heart.  She would miss those she left behind, but she would be stronger for the leaving.  "We will face the Banshee Queen, someday."  Of that Lorna was sure, she would not pass from this life without seeing Sylvannas again, and showing her that she was no victim.  
  
"The Forsaken grow ever bolder.  She will need to be stopped, and she was once one of our own.  So long as she serves the Forsaken, she is a shame of our making and blood.  We will defeat her, in time," Liala said.    
  
Lorna hadn't the luxury of time that her elven sister had, but she would wait.  She needed the strength of training and to learn all that she was capable of before she faced Sylvannas again.  For the first time since the Worgen invasion, she felt again the strength of purpose.  She would learn, and she would find a new place.  And then she would take her vengeance with her friends and a new family of her choosing at her side.  
  
Liala reached to pluck the cub from her lap and drew Lorna to her feet.  "You will need practice, sister mine," she teased gently.  
  
"Aye.  But so do you.  The elves go too long without change.  It's time they learnt a new skill as well," Lorna said, nodding toward the gun over her back.  
  
"Perhaps," Liala allowed, and together they took the path toward the targets.  Lorna's feet felt lighter than they had since the day she reached this city.  Her father would protest, but she knew where her future would lie, now.  He would learn to be glad of what she would become.  
  
***  
  
"You mean to do this, then?" Darius wore his worgen form as he watched Lorna pack her scant belongings.  He changed less often than he had.  Lorna wasn't sure if it was acceptance of his Curse, or simply weariness with pretending.  She hoped that it was the former.  Her father had endured much sorrow in his life, and she wished him to find some measure of peace now, or at least contentment.  She was sorry to add to his unhappiness, but that would not change her mind.  
  
"We've spoken of this, Father.  At length, and with great volume."  Lorna's smile was wry, but she didn't stop her methodical packing.  Dog tumbled about her feet, his sharp little teeth tugging at the fabric of her skirt until she gently poked him away with the toe of her boot.  "I do not even think you disapprove so much as you pretend you do."  
  
Darius grunted, picking up a cloth packet from the small stand beside the bed and turning it over in his claws.  "You mock me, now?"  
  
"It's almost like old times, is it not?"  Lorna shot him a smile.  
  
She was rewarded with an answering grin, flash of yellowing teeth in his pointed maw.  "You always were a stubborn brat of a girl."  He was quiet for a moment, turning the bag over and over.  "They are elves, girl.  You will ever be outside, and they will live on when you are dust."  
  
"I'm outside here, father.  And useless besides.  With Liala, I will be strong, and one day we will return to aid in the fight against the Horde, alongside you and our people."  Lorna finished her packing and hefted it, slinging it over her shoulder and stopping, arms crossing uncomfortably over her chest.  "I would have your love and blessing," she told him.  
  
"But you will leave with or without it," Darius said.  Lorna said nothing, but he read the answer in the set of her shoulders and the steel of her eyes.  He sighed and pressed the bag into her hands with an abrupt motion that would have seemed a threat to anyone who did not know him, and see the pain in his face and the love he felt shining through.  "Seeds of Gilneas," he said.  Lorna peered inside the bag to see the small gathering of seeds.  She recognized them.  They would bloom one day into the flowers she'd once worn behind her ear every day when the season was ripe for them.  "Plant them far afield and let them grow up strong and beautiful in strange soil."  
  
Lorna felt a hint of moisture gathering in her eyes and stubbornly blinked back tears.  "Thank you, father," she whispered.  
  
Darius nodded, awkward and abrupt.  He was silent for a moment and they stared at one another, neither quite sure how to bid farewell.  "If I had granted you the bite, would you have stayed?"  
  
Lorna was startled by the question and took a moment to consider it.  "Yes.  But it would have been the wrong choice," she finally told him.  
  
Darius nodded again, and sighed.  He stepped back, and his shape shifted, crack of bones and snarl of pain as he became again the man she'd known as a child, if older and grimmer.  He wrapped his arms around her then, and she went willingly into his embrace, feeling for a moment like a child forced to leave her father in prison after all too brief a visit.  "Be safe, my daughter.  And come back to us, when you are ready."  
  
Lorna hugged him fiercely and shoved the seeds into the pouch at her belt, stepping away to shoulder her weapons and gather the last of her things.  "I love you," she said instead of goodbye.  She felt her father's eyes on her as she went down the path to meet Liala at the docks, Dog trotting at her heels.  Liala's smile was a welcome balm and she let her new sister's peaceful acceptance comfort her as Lorna set out toward her new life.  
~~  
  



End file.
